Written by Let’s say you’ve decided to do some telemarketing. Yay you. Maybe you’ve decided to get an outsourced telemarketing company to do it for you, because you don’t have the time or resource to do it internally, or maybe you’ve brought in a team or retasked some of your existing staff. Either way, you need to brief them – at least, you do if you don’t want the whole thing to be a waste of time!
Share your goals
This is pretty vital to any campaign – what are your goals? What do you want to achieve out of this activity? It’s number one priority, whether you’re briefing internal or external teams. There’s no sense in starting a campaign without knowing what you want to get out of it. You may or may not have super definite targets, but you absolutely need a goal.
If you’re working with an external company, talk to them about the feasibility of your goal. They have the experience and expertise to know if your plans are just a little too ambitious for your market.
Describe your audience
Next up, your audience. Your telemarketers need to know who you’re going after. You don’t want them wasting time and/or budget going after prospects that won’t be a good fit for you. At a minimum, you’ll want to share job title and industry – Procurement Managers in the Food and Beverage Industry, or Safety Officers in the Manufacturing Industry, for example. Or perhaps, Owners of SMEs in the Professional Services Industries.
But it’s better if you don’t just stop there. You’ve told your team the basic profile of your market, but dig deeper. What matters to your audience? How much can you describe them? The more insight you can give your callers, the more quickly they’ll be able to build a rapport with the people they speak to, and the more successful they’ll be.
Define your timelines
Are you using telemarketing to get people to attend an event? Or sign up for a limited time offer? Do you have peaks and troughs in your seasonal sales cycle? If you know when you need leads, or you’re using telemarketing to support your pipeline during your yearly quiet time, share that information with your telemarketers.
If you have time limited offers or events, make that really clear – it should feed into your messaging anyway, but it’s always worth hammering the point home.
Explain your messaging
Messaging is the key to a successful telemarketing campaign – it’s all about hitting the right note with your prospects, sharing something that’s of value to them, and giving them a reason to be interested in what you offer. You should always have defined messaging, not just leave people to say whatever comes to mind each time they dial out.
When you work with us, for example, we collaborate with you on developing scripts so that we can combine our cold calling expertise with your company messaging, for the best results. To do that effectively, we need to know your key messages.
Don’t try to overload your messaging, either. You need enough to move the prospect to the next stage of your sales process, but not so much that they’re desperate to get you off the phone.
Discuss your data
Part of your briefing should cover your data. Ideally, your database will be filled with the people from your target audience, with all of the information required to reach them. That doesn’t always happen – it’s why one of our services is a database build.
Brief your telemarketers on whether or not they need to cleanse and update your data as they go, build out your database before they start, or simply go through it as it is.
How much data do you have? Depending on how many people you have calling for you, or how many hours you’re outsourcing, you’ll need enough prospects in your database to keep calling. If you only have 100 people in your CRM, it won’t take months to get through them all, so you’ll need to supplement that list to keep up momentum.
Thinking of outsourcing your telemarketing? Give us a whistle and we’ll talk you through the whole process.